Gacha Club

Popular programs in Role Playing

What is Gacha Club

Gacha Club doesn't exactly blaze new territory in the gacha RPG genre, but it does offer a polished take on the ubiquitous game format that's accessible to younger players and suitable for a free to play crowd. Lunime has quickly become one of the biggest players in the free to play mobile game space, and Gacha Club plays like a greatest hit of the dozen or so games already in Lunime's portfolio. That means you can deliver a core campaign in the style of Japanese RPGs, a huge collection of other modes and mini-games to distract you from the main event, and a vast cast of colorful characters to pull for.

Those latter two components are what separates Gacha Club - and Lunime's other games - from the glut of other gacha-based mobile battlers out there. Many of these games emphasize the grind of getting characters maxed out stats and weapons so they can compete in the increasingly accelerating progress of the player vs. player meta-game. Lunime places a significantly greater emphasis on the characters themselves. Rather than enticing you with the amount of damage output a character can offer, they entice you with the little vignettes and interactions that occur when you have the right characters in your team. There's still a grind - and still the ever-present urge to spend a few bucks for another gacha pull - but it's a different type of grind.

Going hand in hand with that emphasis is a customization system that puts the majority of the competition to shame. There are a staggering amount of options for customizing all of the members of your growing party, so it's unlikely that you'll ever run into a team that looks exactly like yours - at least if you take the time to get a little creative with your design. Since you spend your time in battle looking at mostly still images of your team members, it makes sense that Gacha Club included a dedicated studio mode. Studio mode could essentially be a game in its own right. You have access to your whole cast of characters and pets as well as a broad selection of backdrops, and you can combine them together to create scenes. Social activities are front and center in Gacha Club, and they've given players plenty of tools to express their most creative inner selves.

Gacha Club may ostensibly be a Japanese-style roleplaying game, but the actual battle mechanics here are fairly threadbare. There's nothing here that veteran JRPG players haven't already seen, and the core gameplay here has actually been streamlined in the style of modern mobile RPGs. For the most part, characters engage automatically in battle. Your team will line up against the enemy team and trade blows in a turn-based melee. The greatest amount of player interaction comes down to the use of special character-specific abilities that can be fired after an energy bar has been filled up. While the majority of character stats may just look like a list of numbers, these powerful special moves can be a game changer.

Understanding the appeal means understanding that the challenge of battle doesn't come from the moment to moment decisions but rather from the overall farming and team building strategies of the player. The huge roster of characters leaves plenty of opportunities for creative strategizing. And while there's always going to be some characters that dominate the current meta, the randomized nature of receiving characters ensures that almost every player will have to make some creative decisions to accommodate characters they may be lacking. Success on a high level requires players to consider the synergy of different character powers rather than just trying to get their stat numbers as high as possible.

Anchoring the larger game experience is the story mode, and this is the best place for players to start. That's not because the story is especially good. It's a fun and breezy adventure that lets the charm of its characters do the heavy lifting, but it's also an opportunity to get expose to the various game modes in Gacha Club. These story battles are the most generous source of currency in the game, and completing them is one of the quickest ways to level up, grow more competitive, and unlock the different features available to you. And despite the simplicity of its battle system, the later stages provide real changes that will require all but the most overpowered players to think strategically.

These skills will help you in the other roleplaying game modes. Tower mode is Gacha Club's spin on an endurance mode - pitting you against an endless tide of enemies and rewarding and ranking you depending on how deep into the battle you can get. Shadows of Corruption provides an interesting alternative to the traditional story mode. Its challenges are more strategic and resemble puzzles. It asks you to beat a succession of different bosses, and winning earns you the right to add them to your own team.

Another wrinkle to the normal gacha battle formula is the inclusion of pets. Each of these creatures is designed to be cute - and to encourage the player to just roll once more in the gacha - but they also serve an important purpose in battle. Pets are handed out as a relatively common commodity. Players will develop a huge collection in a relatively short amount of time, but incentive is still there for players looking to collect the most rare pets and players who want to upgrade and level their pets to be as competitive in battle as possible.

Four different mini-games round out the Gacha Club experience. None are overly complicated. Each offer a variation on whack-a-mole, memory, first person shooters, and Simon Says. These aren't fully featured games, but they do offer a nice break from the traditional battles of story mode, and they even offer you with rewards you can use to customize and upgrade your characters.

Gacha Club is an interesting game - a gacha that encourages the players to create their own characters and their own adventures rather than propping up the experience on the shoulders of licensed characters or anime tropes. The result is a bit unconventional, but it does a charming job of tying together the characteristics that Lunime works well with.

Pros:

• Huge cast of characters and pets to collect
• Tons of different gameplay modes
• Extensive character creation and customization

Cons:

• Relatively short story campaign
• Requires grinding or spending to be competitive